HOLLYWOOD, Fla., Nov. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Prolexic, the global leader in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services, announced today that it has successfully mitigated two attacks against the popular e-commerce website www.worldofwatches.com.

The website is owned by Swiss Watch International (SWI), a Florida-based company that designs and manufactures timepieces. The company also distributes and owns watch lines including SWI, Edox, Giordano, Jacques Lemans, Magico, Swiss Legend, Triumph Motorcycles and Ventura. The website averages more than 33,000 unique visitors daily, and at peak times, it generates more than US$100,000 each day, so any extended period of downtime can significantly affect revenues.

Despite having a firewall in place, a 130 Mb bandwidth flood penetrated the network via a well-known gaming port and brought down worldofwatches.com for 12 hours. The next day the company called Prolexic about emergency provisioning and mitigating the attack.

"The person we spoke to at Prolexic said they could mitigate the attack within minutes of receiving our traffic, so we signed a contract," said Darin Grey, chief technology officer at Swiss Watch International. "Prolexic gave us a virtual IP address to use, and when I pointed traffic to Prolexic they were able to mitigate the attack and sent us back clean traffic. We were back up and running within minutes as promised."

When it comes to effective DDoS mitigation, Grey believes that relying on an external provider is the best strategy. "Some attacks overwhelm your bandwidth and some overwhelm your hardware," explained Grey. "It is almost impossible for a company to block these large attacks without investing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in extra network equipment. Plus networks like this take time to set up. That's one reason we chose Prolexic."

After the attack was over, SWI increased network capacity to avoid a similar scenario. However, one month later, the website was attacked again, this time with an attack that was three times larger than the first. Network bandwidth flooded and the site went down again, but this time only briefly. Working closely with the website hosting provider, Prolexic successfully stopped this much larger second attack using its cloud-based mitigation network.

Grey has sage advice for other e-commerce providers with revenue-generating websites.

"If you have a successful site and are concerned about outages and you don't have experience in fighting DDoS attacks on a large, large scale, I would definitely recommend Prolexic," he said. "As I've told other people, use it as an insurance plan. If you're not attacked now, you will eventually get attacked as DDoS increases every year. And as your site becomes more successful, you are more of a target."

With Prolexic's cloud-based mitigation network standing between worldofwatches.com and any incoming DDoS attacks, Grey is confident about long-term site availability. "I know we're doing as much as we can to prevent DDoS attacks, and I know I have someone else in my back pocket in case we ever get hit to help mitigate it."

An extended outage caused by a DDoS attack can lead to financial loss, and adversely affect the reputation of your online business, customer relationships and Google search rankings. Learn the best practices that support fast DDoS mitigation in our new white paper, "Strategies for Surviving a Cyber Attack this Holiday Season." Or, to find how much DDoS attacks could affect your business, visit the DDoS Downtime Calculator at www.prolexic.com/downtime.

About Prolexic

Prolexic is the world's largest, most trusted Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation provider. Able to absorb the largest and most complex attacks ever launched, Prolexic restores mission-critical Internet-facing infrastructures for global enterprises and government agencies within minutes. Ten of the world's largest banks and the leading companies in e-Commerce, SaaS, payment processing, travel/hospitality, gaming and other at-risk industries rely on Prolexic to protect their businesses. Founded in 2003 as the world's first in-the-cloud DDoS mitigation platform, Prolexic is headquartered in Hollywood, Florida and has scrubbing centers located in the Americas, Europe and Asia. To learn more about how Prolexic can stop DDoS attacks and protect your business, please visit www.prolexic.com, follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ , YouTube , and @Prolexic on Twitter.

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